31 August 2026
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Let me describe three scenarios.
You live under an authoritarian government. Acting against it is heavily punished by the authorities. But if all of the population acts against it, the government will fall.
A climate crisis has arose from your and your countrymen's behavior. Changing this behavior is costly, but if you all do the crisis is addressed.
A big corporation is doing evil things. Refusing to work for them means missing out on their great salaries. If everyone refused to work for them, the corporation would go bankrupt.
There is a certain incentive structure that repeats itself under authoritarian regimes, environmentalism and the modern corporate world. This pattern, which will also apply in many other situations, is:
Expressed in game theory terms, and simplified to a 2 person scenario, we get11 The exact payoff values are arbitrary. Any linear transformation of these payoffs will give an equivalent game. :
| Dissent | Conform | |
|---|---|---|
| Dissent | 3,3 | -3,0 |
| Conform | 0,-3 | 0,0 |
This matrix describes a 2 player game where each can Dissent from the status quo (i.e. doing X) or Conform to the status quo (i.e. not doing X ). Rows describe what player 1 does, and columns what player 2 does. Each cell is a possible combination of actions and it contains payoffs for player 1 and for player 2, respectively.
Play the game for a bit to familiarize yourself with it:
This game is called Stag Hunt, and it has a long tradition in political philosophy and evolutionary biology. It is mainly used to discuss how a population moves from a purely selfish and non-cooperative "state of nature" to a "social contract" state, where cooperation and rule of law prevails. In our terms, everyone Dissenting would be the "social contract" state.
The name is owed to Rousseau who defines the game in terms of a hunt. But honestly, I don't find this depiction terribly enlightening and I prefer Hume's. He defines the game with two people in a rowing boat: only if both row will the boat move, and rowing costs effort 22 If you really want to know about Rousseau's hunt... A group of people went hunting for a stag (i.e. deer). If everyone sticks to this hunt they will catch the stag and derive a lot of utility from it. But at any point a hunter may go off the group and hunt a rabbit, which he can achieve alone although it provides less utility. In our terms, hunting the stag is Dissenting. . Again, in our terms Dissenting equates to rowing.
"Interesting", you may say, "but what do I care?". It is clear that Stag Hunt is not a model for authoritarian regimes or the environmentalist movement. It is fa(aa)r too simple. Nevertheless, it does capture an incentive structure hidden within them and isolates it. Certain dynamics that we identify in this simplified scenario might very well apply to the real, messy situations.
So, let's analyze the game and see what insight we can get from it.
Stag Hunt has a brother called Prisoner's Dilemma, and he is much more famous. So much so, that in any situation where cooperation between self-interested beings is involved, it is assumed Prisoner's Dilemma is the main model. In our version of Stag Hunt we are talking about Dissent (from the status quo), but this could also be framed as cooperation (among players). Thus, Prisoner's Dilemma could have been (wrongfully) assumed to be the appropriate model and it is important to note the differences.
Here is Prisoner's Dilemma as a table interpreted like the previous one:
| Cooperate | Defect | |
|---|---|---|
| Cooperate | 2,2 | 0,3 |
| Defect | 3,0 | 1,1 |
Before we see in what ways they are different, let's play a round of each game:
In Prisoner's Dilemma if you cooperated you acted irrationally. There are no two ways about it: a rational actor maximizing payoff will never Cooperate. Lets see why. If player 2 Cooperates you should Defect to get 3 instead of 2. And if player 2 Defects you should Defect to get 1 instead of 0. In other words: you should always Defect.
The story is different for Stag Hunt. Neither Dissent nor Conform are irrational strategies. If player 2 Dissents so should you, to get 3 instead of 0. If player 2 Conforms so should you, to get 0 instead of -3. You should play one strategy or the other, depending on what the other player does. Since you do not know what the other player will do, neither strategy can be ruled out, and thus they may both be rational choices for an actor maximizing payoff.
This is a very substantial difference. The irrationality of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma means that two rational agents will inevitably end up in the lower payoff Defect-Defect scenario. That's what makes this game, and the situations it models, a dilemma. Most famous among these is the nuclear arms race. If the US does not build nuclear bombs, the USSR should build them in order to gain total power over it. If the US does build them, the USSR should also do so to avoid being at complete mercy of it. And the preferable non-proliferation scenario eludes the two countries, even if they had perfectly rational leaders that maximized the payoff of their citizens.
The fact that two rational players do not necessarily end up in the Conform-Conform scenario can only be a relief to the situation Stag Hunt models. There are obstacles to achieving the superior Dissent-Dissent scenario (e.g. awareness of the payoffs of each scenario, trust in other players). But they are substantially less insurmountable than rationality itself.
Let's play the game again. This time a couple of rounds against a reactive player who can be persuaded to cooperate (i.e. Dissent with you).
If you believed me, then you Dissented in the hope the other player would too. What happened then? You incurred in a cost, and you are worse off than the other player who conformed.
But to an outside observer that has not seen the situation develop, it just seems like: (1) you are doing poorly and (2) you are Dissenting. She will need to make up her mind: are you worse off because you Dissented or are you Dissenting because you are worse off?
This is a fair question to ask, and we can soundly reason that you are Dissenting because you are worse off. For instance: you may be personally dealing worse than the rest with the current status quo, and this gives you a big incentive for it to change, making you Dissent.
On the basis of this interpretation, your Dissent is the consequence of a personal flaw rather than a socially desirable action that we should all follow. Whenever you are worse off and Dissent, this is a plausible interpretation. And thus, we are going to require you not to be worse off to Dissent, if we are to consider your Dissent as a socially desirable action. As J.B. Peterson puts it: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world"33 I believe the sentence is meant in a self-help, clinical psychology sense. Nevertheless, it is also used in political contexts to express this very idea. .
But Dissenting is costly! It is not possible to Dissent from a well off position 44 If you Dissent you will be worse off than the peer who Conformed. And most peers Conform, or else the status quo would have already changed. Thus, you will be worse off than most. An exception to this would be someone who Conforms until becoming well off and only then starts Dissenting. But this seems exceptional and short-lived, since the cost of Dissenting will eventually eat up any previous gains. . Thus, requiring a well off position to Dissent is covertly making conforming the only valid behavior.
In Peterson's terms: criticizing the world puts your house out of order. Thus, you may criticize the world with an out of order house.
In the literature what we have called Dissent and Conform are referred to as payoff-dominant and risk-dominant strategies, respectively. To make this clearer let's reframe Stag Hunt as a lottery game. Think of the other player's action as some random process (e.g. a draw from a bag of balls). Then, Conforming is akin to not buying a lottery to this raffle (i.e. you spend 0 on the ticket and may win 0). And Dissenting would be equivalent to buying a lottery ticket for 3, and having a certain chance of getting 6 back.
In plain terms, Dissent is a "win big" strategy and Conform a "better safe than sorry" one. By extension, resistance to authoritarian governments, sustainable behavior or corporate boycott are also "win big" strategies. While obvious for the first one, it is rather counter-intuitive for the latter two. Let's look at them in more detail.
If you are in the midst of a climate crisis you may "buy a ticket" to win "curbing the crisis" by eating less beef or flying less. You are guaranteed to miss out on delicious BigMacs and great trips. You may or may not win anything for it.
Similarly, you may "buy a ticket" to win "the evil company goes bankrupt" for the price of the good salary. This rather expensive lottery ticket may, again, win you nothing.
And so, Dissenting from a negative status quo is not only a matter of ethics, idealism or pro-social behavior. It is also a matter of risk tolerance.
This is a somewhat concerning observation. Humans are risk averse. When asked to choose between 50€ or to flip a coin for 150€, the majority of us go for the first option. Our risk aversion makes us go for the safe option even when it has a lower payoff 55 I am referring to the expected value: the sum of the utility of each possible outcome times its probability. In the coin flip, the first option's expected value is 50 $\cdot$ 1, and the second's 150 $\cdot$ 0.5 + 0 $\cdot$ 0.5 = 75. . Thus, even a pro-social population with an awareness of the payoff dominance of Dissenting, may fail to escape a negative status quo purely because of their innate risk aversion.
Conclusions are boring, but I think a wrap up is in order.
Stag Hunt-like dynamics are present in very current issues like the resistance to authoritarian regimes, environmentalism and corporate boycotts. By looking at this simple game, we uncover interesting dynamics that may also show up in the messier real world scenarios.
I highlighted three insights. First, these situations are less of a deadlock than Prisoner's Dilemma-like situations. Secondly, you may criticize the world while your home is in disorder. And finally, human's risk tolerance might determine how these situations unravel.